Chicago Booth’s alumni network in India held its largest-ever gathering last fall as attendees gathered for the annual Pan-India Booth Alumni Retreat, or PIBAR.
The corporate retreat–style event started in 2012 and has grown into a full weekend of learning, networking, and family-friendly activities for Booth graduates and their spouses and children.
“One tangible outcome of PIBAR each year is that there are meaningful discussions within the alumni community on many issues, including how to continue to strengthen the alumni network, build the Chicago brand, and attract top MBA talent to Booth,” said Akshay Sethi, ’07, president of the Chicago Booth Alumni Club of India.
PIBAR is hosted in a different Indian city each year, and helps forge new bonds within the alumni community in India, where more than 400 alumni live.
The most recent PIBAR was held in the coastal city of Chennai last October, at the beachfront Radisson Blu Resort Temple Bay Mamallapuram on the Bay of Bengal. It was the biggest to date: more than 200 alumni and current students and their family members registered to attend, traveling from 21 metro areas and eight countries.
Previous retreats were held in Delhi (2012 and 2014), Mumbai (2013), Bengaluru (2015), and Goa (2016).
Dean Madhav Rajan gave the keynote address, while Nicholas Epley, John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow, gave a special one-day Back to Booth course titled Designing a Good Life. Other speakers included Robert G. Burgess, consul general at the US Consulate General in Chennai; and R. G. Chandramogan, chairman and managing director of Hatsun Agro Product Ltd.
The full weekend included talks from distinguished alumni, interactive break- out sessions on a variety of topics, and fun activities for alumni and their families, including a dance competition and a cook- off with participants sporting Chicago Booth aprons.
As Anil Kumar, ’09, chairman of the PIBAR organizing committee put it, “We are only building on the strong foundation laid, brick by brick, by those before us.”
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